Voice Acting

[obscurus]

I never saw the point in German and French classes at high school. Such a small percentage of the world speaks those languages, it's a waste of time learning them. And fo course, when you're never using a language, you forget it soon anyway.

THey should all know at least some English, so if you do happen to visit they can use that. THat might sound arrogant, but it's in their interest to learn English since it's so widely spoken, not just as a first language, but as a second language for so many people in the world.

 

 

Indeed - these days if you want to learn a language other than English, the sensible options would be Mandarin Chinese, Arabic or Spanish, in that order. The only reason to learn a language (other than as a hobby or to expand your mind) is for emigrating to another country or engaging in commerce with people who speak a foreign language. The latter reason is probably the most compelling for most people, which is why most of the Non-English speaking world teach English in their schools - English is the de facto International Language (so much for Esperanto )

[bob_arctor]

Urm what about holidays and stuff? Spending your free time in another country?

 

To be honest, people always say "nowadays we should all learn Mandarin!"...

 

Well that's rubbish. Because we probably can't. It's hard enough for us to learn French or German, riddled with cognates. Chinese is worse than Japenese (which needs the knowledge of 4000 symbols, or kanji to get by in daily life) as it is not phonetic, has no alphabet to speak of, and is 100% alien.

 

You'll never get good enough to have a conversation, may as well not try. The Chinese are enterprising enough to learn English anyway, loads of Chinese kids at private schools and 6th form colleges.

[Ishtvan]

Ah yes, the "it's hard, so why bother?" strategy. It's probably a little harder than learning a language with the same root as your own, but not that much harder if you work at it. It's possible to pick up the speaking part pretty quickly, it's the reading/writing that's killer.

[obscurus]

Urm what about holidays and stuff? Spending your free time in another country?

 

If you are going on holiday, almost all tourist destinations you can think of will have a population of natives that speak English quite well enough. You would need to be on a very extended holiday to need more than a phrasebook to get by with. There is really no point learning say, German, if you are going there for a six week holiday when most Germans speak English.

 

To be honest, people always say "nowadays we should all learn Mandarin!"...

 

Well that's rubbish. Because we probably can't. It's hard enough for us to learn French or German, riddled with cognates. Chinese is worse than Japenese (which needs the knowledge of 4000 symbols, or kanji to get by in daily life) as it is not phonetic, has no alphabet to speak of, and is 100% alien.

 

You'll never get good enough to have a conversation, may as well not try. The Chinese are enterprising enough to learn English anyway, loads of Chinese kids at private schools and 6th form colleges.

 

 

Crap. Mandarin is grammatically very similar to English (it is an isolating SVO language etc), and once you get the five different tones down (that is the hard part), it is very easy to speak, as it is monosyllabic for the most part. Learning to read and write Chinese is a different matter, but in most of the modern, urban areas of China, signs etc are also written in Pinyin, which is a written, alphabetic form of chinese using roman characters (it is strictly phonetic). If you put in the effort to learn the tones, the rest will come quite easily.

 

You don't need to know 4000 symbols for Japanese - it is a syllabic language, so the Hiragana or Katakana will get you by, and they aren't that hard to learn (couple of hundred characters). You'll find a lot of amusing translations from Japanese to English in Japan, which are usually sufficient to get you by. Japanese is a very easy language to learn from a grammatical point o view, the tricky parts are all of the formalities and the large number of homophones (same word with multiple meanings), but English is just as bad in that regard. If you are going to Japan for an extended period, it is probably worth learning to speak Japanese, as the Japs are fairly proud of their own language and don't really like learning English if they can avoid it.

Edited June 5, 2006 by obscurus

[sparhawk]

If you are going on holiday, almost all tourist destinations you can think of will have a population of natives that speak English quite well enough. You would need to be on a very extended holiday to need more than a phrasebook to get by with.

 

Aparently you were never in an eastern country like Czech, Slowakia, Hungary, etc..

[Order of the Hammer Bureaucrat]

Or Russia, Ukraine, Poland, etc...

The French didn't hold on to Quebec, they abandoned it... Je me souviens.

In January I picked up some tapes of Mandarin and Japanese. My friends couldn't understand anything I tried to say in Mandarin, but Japanese went more smoothly so I stuck with Japanese.

@Ah yes, the "it's hard, so why bother?" strategy. - well let's not discuss it, and just learn it.

Also, personal beef: Mandarin is fine. Arabic is lovely. but why in the world would Spanish be so important considering Spain isn't much of an economic worldpower today, and neither is Mexico?

[sparhawk]

Because in the US spanish is one of the most spoken languages.

[bob_arctor]

Ok well maybe I was wrong about Mandarin. I just think that it's an uphill struggle, and unnecessary for quite a lot of business as the Chinese middle classes are determined to learn English or make their kids learn it, which is why the UK private schools and 6th forms have a lot of Chinese.

 

Let's face it the number of cognates and latin/greek root words are going to be a lot less in Chinese...

 

 

4000 kanji is necessary to get by in Japenese daily life. I can't remember where I picked up this figure, might have been from the Japenese lessons I had. Hirigana is not actually used for much in terms of nouns. Often they have a kanji charecter then 2 hirigana after.

 

Romaji and English are used... but you still need Kanji. And it's a bitch in my opinion. I like katakana as it's used for western words... but again you can't get by on that alone.

 

Also: It's worth learning French if you want to go to France, as often the French don't speak any English, or so little it is too hard to try and speak English. Although this depends where you go. In Brittany you don't have to use French... but why'd you want to go there? It's full of English people.

[Order of the Hammer Bureaucrat]

Go to Flanders. Speak the most lovely language in the world - Nederlands.